The Grindr the Opera crew. What’s more fitting for the world of illusion, than Grindr: an app with a mask for a logo?
Photograph: Supplied

In the Playbill for Nico Muhly and Craig Lucas’s 2013 Metropolitan Opera production of Two Boys, Muhly explained why internet chatrooms worked for them as an operatic concept. “We don’t live in a place where there are masked balls any more. So I thought the internet – where you can really pretend to be another person – would actually be quite a traditional frame for an opera.”

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That idea, of online dating as a masquerade ball for the modern age, has not gone unnoticed by others. A new rehearsed reading in New York this week moves their focus off the computer monitor and tackles the world of phone apps. After all, what’s more fitting for the world of illusion than Grindr: an app with a mask for a logo? Grindr the Opera may not be playing at Lincoln Center yet, but the team behind this new show believe this is more than just a gimmick: it’s an idea with legs, and a topic worth parsing.

It started when composer and librettist Erik Ransom sent a script to friend and director Rachel Klein: she loved it, and he said that was good, because Ransom wanted her to direct it. They then staged a concert of the project in London, bringing in Ransom’s previous collaborator Charles Czarnecki as arranger and eventual musical director. The show began as a project looking at Manhunt.net, an online predecessor to apps like Grindr.

“I went on to see what it was about, and I saw some of the profiles, some of which were very bleak and desperate. And I just thought, “there’s something very operatic about this,” said Ransom.

The show evolved when Ransom saw the change in gay culture around him. “It was just a few years ago I was cruising bars, but people are now on their phones at the bar, so they can see if you’re on Grindr and message you on there. The rejection is softer than if people just turn their head away.”

I saw some of the profiles and I thought, "there’s something very operatic about this”

Now the original Manhunt section exists as a prelude number, which transitions into each character being introduced by their brief Grindr profile.

The five characters, one of which is a drag queen embodiment of the app itself, are drawn from the “tribes” listed on Grindr: the elfish twink, the hairy daddy, etc. It’s an interesting choice considering how controversial these labels can be. On an episode of the now-cancelled Looking, two characters are taken to task for devising a game that pits gay subculture labels against each other, in albeit friendly battle. It’s something Ransom was conscious of, and he never aimed to pander to the tropes. He provides me with the example of the twink character. “We learn about how he got pigeonholed into that subculture and how he embraced it. There are dark avenues that this goes down.”

Klein also made sure they avoided the easy option with these character types, which she puts down to Ransom’s writing. “It has pathos, a story and clearly drawn layered characters,” she says, “but that’s not something you think of when you think of Grindr. Because that gives you only the one-sentence description. And this articulates why they choose what they say.” She likened her role, of an outsider looking in and focusing on the lives of these five people in a larger community, to the recent viral video of a mother looking at her son’s Grindr conversations.

When Grindr the Opera’s reading was first mentioned on Playbill, it became the website’s most shared article, as people tagged friends who might be interested and others mocking the premise.

“It caused a great controversy in that little Facebook conversation. I was very impressed by it, frankly,” said Klein. But what of people who might be deterred more by the medium of opera rather than by the inspiration? For one, Klein added, it’s only 90 minutes. But they also pointed out the variety of musical styles, and the fact their cast is drawn from Broadway shows rather than Met choristers.

“It’s closer to a rock operetta than just an opera,” explained Czarnecki, who promised that even the reading shows the score’s variety. “With bass drums and a piano you really get an instant idea of how vast it is,” he said, “even in just the first two songs.”

The team works out of a basement apartment of a West Village brownstone, the living room filled with music stands and functioning as a rehearsal room. A meeting room with a piano sits round the corner, filled with the “nightmare kitsch” of the house owner’s personal knick knacks. They’ve been thrashing out this show as well as other collaborations, and this reading is just another stage in the long, unsure process to a full run: this week, producers and investors will sit, watch and potentially pledge their support in bringing it to the stage. But the team are not just looking to Broadway.

“We also extended our presentation to people from the nightlife community,” said Klein, “one avenue the show could take is as an extravagant nightlife performance.” It’s an avenue explored by productions before it: the Public Theater has previously toyed with nightclubs as musical theatre in Here Lies Love for example, or even the early runs of Hair.

With Broadway discovering a trend of weird, often very queer shows that become commercial successes – Kinky Boots or Hedwig and the Angry Inch’s recent revival – it might be a good time for a show about queerness to look for backing. They have dreams already of what the show would look like in a big theatre. “I imagine one day, when the show is running, instead of programs we’ll just have Grindr accounts with the actor’s bios,” Ransom said. That dream may only be a few swipes away.